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The following courses are being offered during the Spring 2025 semester. This list does not capture all of the possible courses, but rather a selection of recommended courses for students interested in health humanities at UNC.

All of the courses listed are related to the health humanities and may qualify for health humanities related degree programs. Please note that there is a limit on the number of courses that can double-count toward two or more minors/majors. Students enrolled in multiple programs should work closely with academic advising when selecting courses. 

Are you teaching or do you know about other health humanities courses? Send your recommendations and/or corrections to hhive@unc.edu.

ENGL 071H: FYS – Healers & Patients

Kym Weed | TuTh 12:30-1:45pm

When medical anthropologist Arthur Kleinman writes that “illness has meaning,” he reminds us that the human experience of being sick involves more than bodily symptoms. Moreover, the effects of illness and disability are rarely confined to one person. In this course, we will analyze a diverse collection of writers who work to make sense of illness and disability through a range of genres including fiction, non-fiction, poetry, film, comics, podcasts, and scholarship. We will explore the ways that people experience, make meaning from, and represent illness, caregiving, and disability. 

First-year students only.

ENGL 089-001: FYS – The Rhetoric of Wellness

Daniel Anderson | TuTh 9:30-10:45am

Scan any bookstore shelf and you’d think the human psyche is hanging on by a thread. From fighting anxiety to seeking happiness to putting an end to procrastination, the titles compete for the opportunity to fix our problems with the promise of self-improvement. But are we really in worse psychological shape than those who have come before us? And how would we begin to study the status of our wellness? This first-year seminar will offer one approach to exploring these and related questions: studying the rhetoric of self-help. Rhetoric provides a lens for thinking about the ways people talk about self-help. This lens will drive the organization of the course. Studying the language in online self-help discourse, for instance, will enable extensive research activities. Students will learn to collect a corpus of Tweet data, and then use grounded theory and qualitative approaches to study the conversation. Using mixed methods, they will then quantify interpretations and develop visuals to recognize patterns. In addition to working with contemporary online discourse, students will explore texts with historical instantiations of self-help rhetoric—from classical instruction linked with civics and oration to medieval meditations to 1960s and 70s self-actualization to modern mindfulness. Rhetorical study will also facilitate the production of knowledge as students translate their understanding into communication to be shared publicly. The class activities will feature the creation of texts in a range of media. Students will produce print reports, visual memes, and PSA video projects. Students will also explore oral communication through the creation of podcasts. The combination of mixed methods research and public communication will drive the class. Teaching methods will tap into this dynamic by augmenting lecture and discussion with hands-on activities, collaboration, and the drafting and revision of projects.

First-year students only.

ENGL 146: Science Fiction/Fantasy/Utopia

Tyler Curtain | MWF 1:25-2:15pm

Readings in and theories of science fiction, utopian and dystopian literatures, and fantasy fiction.

ENGL 161: Literature of War

Hillary Lithgow | TuTh 3:30-4:45pm

This is a class about literature and war and what each might teach us about the other. We will consider a range of texts and center our work around this question: what, if anything, can a work of art help us see or understand about war that might not be shown by other means? Students may not receive credit for both ENGL 73 and ENGL 161.

ENGL 163: Introduction to Health Humanities

Hill Taylor Jr. | TuTh 3:30-4:45pm

This course will introduce students to the key critical concepts, debates, and questions of practice in the interdisciplinary field of health humanities. Students will draw on humanities methods to analyze topics related to human health, illness, and disability. Topics to be considered may include narrative medicine, disability studies, chronic illness, graphic medicine, health activism, mortality, and healthcare systems.

ENGL 268H: Medicine, Literature, and Culture

Matthew Taylor | TuTh 11:00-12:15am

This course provides an introduction to Health Humanities, an interdisciplinary field that combines methods and topics from literary studies, healthcare, and the human sciences.  We’ll read novels, screen films, learn about illnesses and treatments, and hear expert speakers as we investigate the importance of narrative in the time of high-tech medicine.  We’ll play close attention to how ideas about sickness have changed over time and across cultures. Topics will include the clinician-patient relationship, medical detection, the rise of psychiatry, racism and social determinants of health, epidemics and the “outbreak narrative,” and the quest for immortality.

This course welcomes students from all fields—especially humanities majors and those interested in careers in healthcare and health affairs.

ENGL 269: Introduction to Disability Studies

Kym Weed | TuTh 9:30-10:45am

Disability Studies is an interdisciplinary field that, according to Simi Linton, “aims to expose the ways that disability has been made exceptional and to work to naturalize disabled people.” This course will introduce students to key critical concepts and debates in the field of Disability Studies by drawing multiple disciplinary perspectives. Through readings (critical essays, fiction, memoir, poetry, and film), and professor- and student-led discussion, students in this course will be introduced to the biomedical, social, and justice models of disability; explore the histories of disability communities and activists; examine representations of disability; and study how multiple forms of inequality and oppression intersect with disability and disability justice work.

ENGL/FOLK 487: Personal Narrative & Legend

Jordan Lovejoy | TuTh 12:30-1:45pm

Oral storytelling may seem old-fashioned, but we tell true (or possibly true) stories every day. We will study personal narratives (about our own experiences) and legends (about improbable, intriguing events), exploring the techniques and structures that make them effective communication tools and the influence of different contexts and audiences.

ENGL 593: Internship in Health Humanities

TBD

An opportunity to gain credit for an internship in a field related to the study of health humanities, such as science writing, health non-profit work, and qualitative research. Requirements include regular journal entries, meetings with a faculty advisor, and a final report of 10-15 pages. 

All prospective interns must coordinate an internship placement, secure an academic adviser who is willing to meet with them during the semester at least three times, and submit an approved Internship Proposal before the first day of classes and before any internship work begins. 

Graduate students are required to take ENGL 695 or ENGL 763 (this may be done concurrently with ENGL 696); Undergraduates are required to take ENGL 268 or an equivalent course, plus at least 1 additional upper-division ENGL course.  

ENGL 687: Queer Latinx Environmentalisms

Maria DeGuzman | MWF 10:10-11:00am

This mixed level graduate and advanced undergraduate course examines queer LatinX literature from the late 1980s to the present as it intersects with ecological and environmentalist concerns. LatinX literature is multi-ethno-racial and, even when emerging from the United States, is multi-national and transnational. We explore how these cultural productions question normative assumptions about the “order of things,” the “naturalness” of nature, and the “inevitability” of the historical exploitations of coloniality and the ongoing predations of neocolonialism. We pay close attention to LatinX cultural productions that approach cosmology, ecology, and environmental justice from queer perspectives and that queer ecological concerns from minoritized perspectives. “Queer” and “LatinX,” combined with one another and modifying “Environmentalisms,” signal other ways of thinking, doing, being, and becoming. These other ways entail exploring concepts of “nature” entangled with and dis-entangled from the coercive essentialisms of “natural law” and the violent settler-colonialism informing patriarchal capitalist “normalcy”; thinking beyond the blinders of heteronormative and species-hierarchical traditional humanism; perceiving and valuing multiple forms of kinship between humans and between humans and other life forms; ceasing to measure worth by a compulsory procreational model; conceiving sustainable interdependencies and thriving assemblages; and cultivating the diversity of diversity as part of salvaging what remains of biodiversity in this time of human-induced global and planetary crisis. 

Important Note: This course is part of the Latina/o Studies Program minor, and LSP students may not be able to count this course toward another major/minor.

ENGL 861: This Is How the World Ends/Begins: Revolutions in Early Black Speculative Fiction

Matt Taylor | Th 12:30-3:30pm

A number of recent Afropessimist artists and scholars have argued that anti-Black racism will cease only with the end of the world. Our course will engage this provocation by focusing on late-19th and early-20th-century Black speculative fiction in the U.S. that imagines both the overthrow of existing orders and the emergence of other possibilities of being. We will read these texts in conversation with formative works in Afrofuturist and Afropessimist theory, exploring how the two archives mutually illuminate and complicate each other, particularly with respect to what Saidiya Hartman calls “critical fabulation.” A portion of the semester’s readings will be determined collectively by the class, with an option of incorporating contemporary literature and film relevant to the course’s themes. Authors likely will include Charles Chesnutt, Martin R. Delaney, W.E.B. Du Bois, Sutton E. Griggs, Saidiya Hartman, Pauline Hopkins, Zora Neal Hurston, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Fred Moten, George Schuyler, and Frank B. Wilderson III, among others.

ANTH 089: FYS – Vulnerability and Disability (Anthropology of Disability)

Dafna Rachok | MWF 11:15am-12:05pm

Disability is a part of life: we all get sick, age, and require care. This course examines debates on disability from a perspective of cultural and medical anthropology. We focus on the diversity and richness of disability worlds, learning how different societies make sense of disability and how living with disability leads to a proliferation of identities and cultures. This course covers a wide range of topics, from the history of disability to cross-cultural approaches to mental health to the intersections of disability with gender and sexuality to caregiving. Course material illustrates that disability is a collective project that encourages individuals and communities to engage in creative modes of thinking and being in a world that moves beyond the binary of disabilities.

First-year students only.

ANTH 147: Comparative Healing Systems

Jocelyn Chua | TuTh 12:30-1:45pm

In this course we compare a variety of healing beliefs and practices so that students may gain a better understanding of their own society, culture, and medical system.

ANTH 270: Living Medicine

Martha E. King | TuTh 9:30-10:45am

This course examines the social and cultural experience of medicine, the interpersonal and personal aspects of healing and being healed. It explores how medicine shapes and is shaped by those who inhabit this vital arena of human interaction: physicians, nurses, other professionals and administrators; patients; families; friends and advocates.

ANTH 290: Sports and Society

Douglas Smit | MWF 1:25-2:15pm

TBD

ANTH 290: Environmental Justice in SE Asia
Terese Gagnon | TuTh 3:30-4:45pm

TBD

ANTH 319: Global Health

Mark Sorensen | MWF 10:10-11am

This class explores some of the historical, biological, economic, medical, and social issues surrounding globalization and health consequences.

ANTH 326: Practicing Medical Anthropology

Martha E. King | MWF 1:25-2:15pm

A workshop on careers in medical anthropology and the kinds of contributions that medical anthropologists make to health care professions. Students will learn skills including interviewing methods, writing for diverse audiences, and blogging. Intended for medical anthropology minors and students interested in bringing anthropological perspectives to a range of practical contexts.

ANTH 328: Anthropology of Care

Sugandh Gupta | TuTh 3:30-4:45pm

In this course, we study how medical anthropologists have come to think and write about the concept and practice of care over the last two decades. We will draw on ethnographic literature from a wide range of sites, such as the home, the hospital, the arctic circle, and international border posts, to explore big-picture questions about the efficacy of modern medicine, state of social justice, and challenges facing humanity in the world today. Restricted to medical anthropology majors.

ANTH 389: Anthropology of Fitness Culture

Emily Curtin | MWF 11:15am-12:05pm

TBD

ANTH 390: Anthropology of Global Health and Biosecurity

Melissa Salm | MWF 1:25-2:15pm

TBD

ANTH 390: Climate Change and Health

Emily Curtin | TuTh 2:00-3:15pm

TBD

ANTH 390: Science Skepticism

Melissa Salm | MWF 11:15-12:05pm

TBD

ANTH 390: Medicine, the State, and Subject

Dafna Rachok | MWF 12:20-1:10pm

TBD

ANTH 430: War, Medicine, and the Military

Jocelyn Chua | TuTh 9:30-10:45am

This course provides anthropological perspectives on the interrelationships between medicine and medical research, military institutions, and war.

ANTH 473: Body & Subject

Emily Curtin | MWF 9:05-9:55am

Anthropological and historical studies of cultural constructions of bodily experience and subjectivity are reviewed, with emphasis on the genesis of the modern individual and cultural approaches to gender and sexuality.

ANTH 690: Trauma, Memory, and Healing

Michele Rivkin-Fish | W 6-8:30pm

TBD

ANTH 702: Theory/Ethnography

*Can count for LMC credit if student completes a health humanities project.

Martha King | W 9:30am-12:30pm

TBD

GEOG 240: Introduction to Environmental Justice

Sara H. Smith | MWF 11:15am-12:05pm

Environmental justice is about social equity and its relationship to the environment. This course provides an introduction to the principles, history, and scholarship of environmental justice. It traces the origins of the movement in the US and globally and its relationship to environmentalism. Students will use case studies and engagement to become familiar with environmental justice concerns related to food systems, environmental health, climate change, and economic development.

HBEH 710: Community Capacity, Competence, and Power

Alexandra F. Lightfoot | Th 12:30-3:15pm

The nature and delineation of participatory action research and its relevance to concepts, principles, and practices of community empowerment. Students learn methods (such as photovoice) through learning projects.

HBEH 720: Health Equity Methods

Yesenia Merino | TuTh 3:30-4:45pm

This course provides students with the tools to select methods, collect and analyze data, and evaluate programs, all using an equity lens. We discuss critical approaches to quantitative and qualitative methods, how to develop equity-centering and inclusive measurements, and how to use community-based approaches to data collection and analysis.

HBEH 825: Seminar in Interdisciplinary Health Communication

Maria Leonora Comello | M 9:30am-12:15pm

Interdisciplinary overview of communication theory and research and critical analysis of applications of theory to interventions using communication for health.
Permission required for non-majors.

HPM 757: Health Reform: Political Dynamics and Policy Dilemmas

Jonathan B. Oberlander | Th 2:00-4:45pm

This course focuses on the political and policy dynamics of healthcare reform. 

HPM 758: Underserved Populations and Health Reform

Kimberly Renee Ramseur | W 8:00-9:30pm

Brieanne G. Lydia McDonald | Tu 6:00-7:30pm

This course gives students a greater understanding of programs available to serve underserved populations, and how the ACA (or any replacement) will impact on care provided to underserved populations. The course is designed to help students think critically about the impact of policy changes on different populations.

HNRS 089: FYS – Medicine and Narrative – Writing COVID / Writing Us

Terry Holt | We 2:30-5:00pm

A workshop in autobiographical and creative short story, focusing on the complex connections between story-telling, interpretive skill, and the practice of medicine. Students will write and present autobiographical and and creative short stories about illness and medical care; the seminar will meet weekly to discuss these stories, attempting to identify and articulate the key issues each story expresses about what it means to be sick, what it might mean to take care of others in their illness. The writing and (especially) interpretive skills acquired in this workshop are directly valuable to anyone contemplating a career in medicine, but are equally valuable to anyone who might at some point encounter (in themselves or in someone they care for) the trauma of illness. In addition to the weekly workshop, participants will have one-on-one conferences with the instructor (himself an MD with an international reputation as a writer). A semester-long journal, focusing on the reverberations of the pandemic on the writer’s daily (actual and interior) life, will form the basis for a final project, which may (at student option) be in the form of written narrative, an audio composition, or a film, composed using the tools available at the University’s Media Resources Center.

First-year students only.

HNRS 350: Learning the Art of Medicine

Matthew Nielsen | Tu 6:00-7:00pm
This course is designed to supplement knowledge obtained through the traditional pre-medical curriculum in order to enhance students’ development as health care providers. It has the following objectives:

1) Work in the health professions provides many different pathways for individuals to find meaning, purpose, and impact in the world.  We will explore a variety of perspectives through a series of invited speakers from our community.

2) Broad and overlapping currents in the organization of medical care, payment for healthcare services, performance improvement, government regulation, and innovation have been shaping the environment within which care is delivered in this country for decades.  These will continue to shape the environment for the decades to come.  The seminar will provide students with an overview of changes in the delivery of medical care across several of these areas.

3) The course will explore dimensions of person- and family-centered care, which has led to many advances in research and clinical care delivery.  This can also include understanding the social situation of your patient, including environmental, financial and familial factors.

4) The course will provide students with information about navigating the medical training system as well as an introduction to the interprofessional team-based nature of health care delivery.

Honors Carolina third and fourth year students only. 1 credit hour course.

MEJO 469: Health Communication & Marketing

Rebecca Fish | MoWe 12:30-1:45pm

Forbes magazine projects a crest of increasing employment in healthcare over the next decade. This means the strategic communication skill set is in high demand by hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, healthcare advertising or PR agencies, insurance companies, non-profit organizations, and more. In this course, students will learn about the healthcare sector, explore the patient journey, map stakeholders and influencers, and get hands-on experience with marketing and communications that can help people lead healthier lives.

MEJO 560: Environmental and Science Journalism

Thomas R. Linden | MoWe 2:00-3:15pm

Prepare students to work as environmental and science journalists. The course emphasizes writing skills in all delivery formats and interpreting environmental, science, and medical information for consumers. Previously offered as HBEH 660/HBEH 660H/HPM 550/HPM 550H. Honors version available.

MEJO 850: Qualitative Research Methods

Barbara G. Friedman | We 11:00am-1:45pm

Survey of naturalistic methods applied to mass communication research, including ethnography, in-depth interviews, life histories, and text-based analysis.

PHIL 150: Philosophy of Science

Marc B. Lange | TuTh 12:30-1:45pm

What is distinctive about the kind of knowledge called “science”? What is scientific explanation? How are scientific theories related to empirical evidence? Honors version available.

PHIL 165: Bioethics

William Lewis | MWF 8:00-8:50am

Ava Geenen | MWF 10:10-11:00am

An examination of ethical issues in the life sciences and technologies, medicine, public health, and/or human interaction with nonhuman animals or the living environment. Honors version available.

PSYC 504: Health Psychology 

Karen M. Gil | TuTh 11:00am-12:15pm

An in-depth coverage of psychological, biological, and social factors that may be involved with health.

PUBH 420/PUBH 720: HIV/AIDS Course

1 credit hour

Ronald P. Strauss, Christopher Hurt | Tu 5:00-6:15pm

This course offers participants a multidisciplinary perspective on HIV/AIDS — its etiology, immunology, epidemiology, and impact on individuals and society. The course will ask what lessons about pandemics can be learned from studying HIV/AIDS, with a specific focus on parallels with COVID-19. Open to undergraduate, graduate, and professional students.

PUBH 710: Introduction to Global Health Ethics

William Fleming | TBD

This course is designed to give students the skills to identify and effectively address ethical issues that arise in global health research and practice.

PUBH 724: Public Health and Migration

Laura Villa-Torres | F 2:30-4:10pm

This course examines migration from a global public health perspective. We take a broad understanding of migration, as the process of moving from one’s place of origin to another compelled by different factors (i.e., economic, political, environmental). We discuss social determinants of migration and its health effects, and public health interventions. This class teaches students basic qualitative research skills, including drafting qualitative research questions, interview guides, and conducting and analyzing in-depth interviews.

RELI 065: FYS – Myth, Philosophy, and Science in the Ancient World

Zlatko Pleše | TuTh 11:00am-12:15pm

This interdisciplinary course explores various, often conflicting ways of conceiving and shaping reality in the ancient world – religious, scientific, and philosophical. The course is organized around a series of case studies: (1) the formation and makeup of the cosmos; (2) the origin of mankind and its sexual differentiation; (3) the invention of the ‘self’; (4) the origin and nature of dreams; (5) foundations of law, justice, and morality. Short writing assignments, in-class discussions, oral presentations, and a term-paper will be used to introduce students into a complex intellectual network of natural scientists, philosophers, and oral story-tellers throughout the ancient Mediterranean world. Readings include Near Eastern mythical narratives and Homeric poems and hymns; selections from the earliest Greek philosophers through Plato’s dialogues to Hellenistic and Roman philosophical schools; works from the famous Hippocratic corpus and Galen’s medical treatises; and various religious texts from ancient Greece and Rome, early Christianity, and late antiquity.

RELI 421: Religion and Science

Randall G. Styers | MoWe 5:00-6:15pm

This course explores the complex relation between religion and science in the modern world. Public disputes over teaching evolution in American schools serve as a central case study of this.

RELI 824: Body, Materiality, History

Jessica Boon | We 5:00-7:50pm

This course addresses theories of the body in the study of history. It expands standard notions of “the body” by considering developments in scientific and medical approaches, then turning to the fields of gender and sexuality studies, disability studies, critical race theory, and postcolonial theory, and ending with consideration of the body’s expression through material culture. Extensive historical case studies will be taken from scholarship on Western, Eastern, and indigenous religions.

SOCI 422: Sociology of Mental Health and Illness

Taylor Hargrove | TuTh 5:00-6:15pm

Examines the uniqueness of the sociological perspective in understanding mental health and illness. Draws upon various theoretical perspectives to best understand patterns, trends, and definitions of mental health and illness in social context. Focuses on how social factors influence definitions, perceptions, patterns, and trends of mental health and illness.

SOCI 469: Health and Society

Denise Mitchell | MWF 12:20-1:10pm

The primary objective of the course is to explain how and why particular social arrangements affect the types and distribution of diseases, as well as the types of health promotion and disease prevention practices that societies promote.

SPAN 363: Experiences of Disease and Health through Hispanic Literature and Culture

Juan C. Gonzalez-Espitia | TuTh 9:30-10:45am

This course seeks new perspectives on disease, literature, and culture in the Hispanic milieu. We will examine texts that present disease as theme, as aesthetic approach, as self-representation, or as metaphor in the Spanish-speaking world.